This post is a transcript of Around The ‘Verse – Episode 2.07, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG, but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. INN edits our transcripts for the purpose of making the various show participants easier to understand in writing. Enjoy!

Around The ‘Verse – Episode 2.07 – Transcript

00:29 – Intro

SG: Hey everybody and welcome to episode 2.07 of Around the Verse: “Gone to Texas”. I’m Sandi Gardiner

BL: And I’m Ben Lesnick!

SG: This week on Around the Verse we sit down with Games Support Manager, Will Leverett, to find out what really goes into each Star Citizen update.

BL: And then Chris Smith gives us the tour of the all new Connie currently being prepped for Star Citizen Alpha 2.0.

SG: Excellent, I’m excited for that because that will help me move the collectors boxes along. And here we are visiting with our friends at Cloud Imperium Games Texas.

BL: Cloud Imperium Games Texas here in Bee Cave just outside of Austin. The team here is responsible for Live Operations, keeping the servers running; QA, they’ve been instrumental in building the Persistent Universe. And of course Austin looms large in Star Citizen’s history, this is where we kicked this whole project off back at GDC Online in 2012.

SG: Mm-hmm, and where we first met.

BL: Yes! I met you for the first time at Richard Garriott’s office, you were, we were rapidly redoing the presentation at the last minute.

SG: That is true. And I think you were impressed with my eating skills. Remember that?

BL: Yes, yes, I do remember that.

SG: Meanwhile back at the ranch the Santa Monica team is moving to our new headquarters this week so ATV will be coming from our new offices.

BL: Yes. We can’t wait to show them off. And see them ourselves!

SG: Mm-hmm, and I am going to get in there with Tom and somebody he’s organised to build us some sets.

BL: Yep, we have some exciting plans for our shows, they’re going to look better than ever. Bear with us while we get that up and running. It’s going to be good.

SG: Sets on wheels!

BL: Sets on wheels!

SG: Sets on wheels.

BL: Meanwhile the team everywhere else is busy with Star Citizen Alpha 2.0. We know everyone is curious when it’s coming, when it’s coming. We can’t say yet because it has to go through the testing and then bug fixing process, but we can say that it is now 100% content locked, nothing else can be added to the build. So it’s all up to QA and the bug smashers to get this thing out. And when it’s ready: we’ll tell you!

SG: So let’s go to the Spectrum and find out what the teams have been working on.

02:45 – News From Around the Verse

EKD: And we’ve got an update for you this week. Darian what have we got?

DV: So first and foremost you may have heard that we are getting ready to move into our new building. A much larger facility so we can actually expand our staff. The place is actually pretty monstrous and we finalising and packing up all our stuff. We’re starting the beginning of the move pretty soon. So hopefully you can start seeing us broadcasting from the new place.

EKD: It’s going to be very exciting. I know that everyone upstairs is going to be very jazzed and right now we’re just doing the best we can to minimise the impact so we can keep development rolling. What else?

DV: Lets see. Oh, EMP!

EKD: EMP!

DV: EMP. So if you guys haven’t read on the website there is a large description of how the EMP system works. What we’re doing right now is actually finalising a lot on how the system will disable other components such as the radar or the targeter or the identifier or even how it affects missiles if you get hit by an EMP shock and how it affects even just your own ship. The EMP stuff is new functionality we’re adding into the game, it’s pretty exciting and I can’t wait to see what it looks like when the VFX guys finally create what that effect is going to look like.

EKD: Yeah. That’s going to be really cool. And we’re also working on, on top of all that, we’re concepting … we’re trying to get a lot of the style guides put together for all the ships. It evolves over time, we’ve talked about that in previous all kinds of “10 For …” discussions. One of the ones we’re working on right now, Gurmukh has been working on, Anvil, alongside Mark Skelton, and some of the ships we’re going to be debuting very soon.

DV: So what this style guide is for is essentially creating a design standard base for each manufacturer, like if you saw the car manufacturer like Nissan or Honda. All of them has this standard uniform appearance to them: we’re trying to do the same thing with our spaceships so you can recognise and Aegis or an Anvil or an RSI ship based on just its stylisation.

EKD: And there you have it. That’s Santa Monica. Again I’m Eric.

DV: I’m Darian

EKD: See you next week.

4:43 – Austin TX

JR: Hey guys Jake Ross here, Associate Producer of the Persistent Universe, coming at you in High Definition. We have the Community Team out here from LA visiting us here in Austin so we have a proper video setup and actual audio microphone here, so that’s nice.

JR: So I’m here with you today to talk a little bit about clothing, assets, animation and props. So we are working CGBot again on various things, primarily clothing assets for our Casaba Outlet shop which we’ve got coming up here in a release here pretty soon. We got our first drop from them recently and we’re testing that out in game and its rolling really nicely. We have a few more assets in development with them so hopefully we’ll have a little bit more variety when the shop first launches. So that’s pretty cool.

JR: On the animation side we have Jay Brushwood and Daniel Craig working on the Constellation animations basically just a final touch up polish pass from those guys. They’ve got doors opening, little tier three animation polish is what we’re calling it. So that will be wrapping up here pretty soon, at which point they’ll move on to the Vanguard animations. We’re excited to get them started on that.

JR: Lastly we are working on designing the props we’re going to have for the Nyx Levski landing zone. We have our designers here in house formulating a prop list; figuring out what they want to populate the environment with and then we’ll send that list off to the Prop Team in the UK and they’ll prioritise, or rather provide the resources we need and we’ll prioritise they need to work on first. We trying to fill out that space as we near completion so that’ll be cool to see as well.

JR: That’s all I got for you this week. Thanks guys. See you.

6:35 – Foundry 42, UK

AT: Hey everybody, my name is Andrew Tidlesley, I’m a Producer working on Squadron 42 on characters, faces and cinematics. And this is …

JJ: Jon Jones, Lead Facial Animator.

AT: Excellent. So we’re just continuing from last week when Sian Crewe and Mike Dalston were speaking about the facial scanning experience in Ealing. Just going to bring you right up to speed with the facial pipeline. In short once the scan is complete in Ealing; the facial data is sent across to 3Lateral, a company out in Serbia responsible for building the 3D rig head. Takes approximately six weeks to build.

JJ: Yep.

AT: From there, we receive it back, fully 3D and ready; we prep it for engine using Red9 tools; we do a quick polish pass and then we send that rig to Cubic Motion.

JJ: Yeah.

AT: Outsourcing company in Manchester who responsible for facial animations.

JJ: Yeah, goes to Cubic with all the head cam footage which you can see on the screen here on this camera. They’ve got sixty days worth of footage from all the actors which they remap, pretty much one-to-one, from the video footage onto the game characters. Looks awesome.

AT: Looks uncomfortable!

JJ: It is.

AT: Okay, so from there we receive the facial animation data back from Cubic Motion; we align the body data that comes back from Imaginarium Studios with the face data that comes back from, that doesn’t help!

JJ: Sorry!

AT: Comes back from Cubic Motion and the audio data as well; we do a quick polish pass; sync everything up

JJ: Yep!

AT: And that it. Bob’s your uncle. So the first example of the facial pipeline in operation was the Bishop’s Speech, right?

JJ: Yeah, yeah, that was the first big kind of stress test of the whole pipeline. Ran into a few issues that we got sorted and a few other bits and bobs which are still ongoing. So once they’re sorted it’s going to look a whole lot better than what you’ve seen so far.

AT: Excellent. Can’t wait. And that’s it from us.Thank’s very much guys.

8:31 Foundry 42, DE

BC: Hey everyone, Brian Chambers from the Frankfurt office again. Thanks for watching. This week we have Hanness with us, the Director of Cinematics, Cinematics Director?

HA: Whatever.

BC: Whatever. You’ve seen a lot of his work and he’s working hard. I’m glad to be able to pull him from his desk so he can come in and talk about what he’s been working on and so on.

HA: Yeah. We are currently working on, which is super exciting, on a scene where Mr Hamill goes into the cockpit again, so it’s like a return to what he did in several other franchises I would say! It’s a really, really nice scene and we basically… In the Cinematics department we are also always the first ones to actually have a look at the scanned heads when they come back so we can basically discuss if the hair is good enough for certain close up or how the eyes look so we kind of get this…

BC: Yeah, I honestly saw his head for the first time at your desk, I think yesterday or the day before. It was pretty, pretty nice.

HA: And the John Rhys-Davies head is currently prepared and my colleague is working on a scene in the UEE Navy Hospital but I don’t want to be called Mr Spoil-a-lot, so why you are in the hospital or if you are in the hospital or when you are in the hospital or something like this will not get discussed here. And then Frank, my Senior Environment Artist, is still working on some awesome skydock for a giant captial ship which is also part of the story.

BC: That’s cool. Yeah, we actually shared some of those pictures of the skydock for the Monthly Report we just put out.

HA: The scene is like massive.

BC: Yeah

HA: Like, we were floating around to scene: “Can you get closer to the ship” “Yeah, but it would like take 10 minutes or something!”

BC: That’s cool.

HA: It’s like six kilometers or something. Or five.

BC: How would you say, so far, cinematic production is going overall? Is it parts falling into place or you got bumps, you got issues? How’s it going?

HA: We are currently waiting on some of the heads to be delivered but some of the main heads are already done. The selection process of all the takes we did during the main shoot which we had at Imaginarium is also pretty much done. The shoot itself covered 90% or even more of the story material we actually need for the campaign.So in that regard we are really good. I think, it will be at one point we might need to have one or two more animators in our department seeing the workload will be a lot when we finally get crunching on the heavier scenes with ten people on the bridge or something like that.

HA: What I like about this production is that we had this blueprint from the beginning with the script being done, and then there’s not much edit any more to it, at least from a story point of view. Of course some of the gameplay and the mission changes but the story is locked which is really nice. Every little sentence is locked which even more.

BC: It’s funny I’m sitting here smiling because I was at the shoot for a period of time, I had my own copy of the script. Once that script comes out to everybody and the story and all that is revealed: it’s cool! It kind of twists and turns and goes places you’re not quite sure where it was going to and its…

HA: And also, I think, the right amount of humour without resorting to poop jokes or anything like this and it takes itself serious, but not too serious, and in moments it is really intelligent. I have to say Dave Haddock and Will Weisbaum did a nice job.

BC: That’s cool. Cool. Well thanks again for watching guys. I could honestly sit here and talk with Hanness for another twenty minutes about this but we try to keep these short and sweet like I always say. So thanks for watching and we’ll see you next week.

12:57 – ATV Interview with Will Leverett

JH: Thanks guys, today we’re sitting down with game support manager Will Leverett. Will, how you doing man?

WL: What’s going on? How’s it going? Welcome to Austin?

JH: It’s been great. We just had Argentinian food at the cafe Buenos Ares.

WL: Well you’ve got to get some breakfast tacos with us too. Best here in Texas.

JH: Breakfast tacos, and I’m told we have to try Amy’s ice cream.

WL: It’s really good, get that.

JH: Well, mission accomplished already. So, game support manager.

WL: Yes sir.

JH: Let’s start off by telling folks what that is.

WL: So, it’s a couple of things. The basic part of the job is doing basic technical support tickets, and that’s for anyone who has software or hardware problems. We work to troubleshoot, get those players back into the game. We used to do bug reports through game support as well, but we’ve now moved that to the issue council, and so as you know we’ve worked with QA and Turbulent to get that up and running, so we’re pretty proud of getting that up. The other part that we work with is we’re part of the live publish process, and what we do is help communicate to players the state at the surface, so it’s making sure players know downtimes, how long are the servers going to be down. We help manage PTU playtests, and we help make sure that we’re doing our best to communicate the state of the game as it is to players as best as we can.

JH: And that includes patch notes?

WL: That includes patch notes. Now, we’re closely working with QA to do that, and we’re actually offloaded some of the duties off to QA, so I’d be remiss by saying I do that by myself. I’d be kind of stealing, so apologies to QA. I’m not totally doing it by myself.

JH: Ah, those QA guys, they just play video games all day.

WL: *pew pew*

JH: So, you’ve done this kind of work before, I take it. What are the ‘never during development’?

WL: This has been a big challenge for me personally. I’ve never done, never treated a game in development like a live service, and I think that’s been a challenge for a lot of us. There’s a lot of, I don’t want to say broken things, but just unfinished things that we put out for players to test, and so it’s been an experience trying to make sure that people keep their heads cool and understand that yes, we’re in the Alpha phase of Star Citizen development, this is not the finished product, and there’s lots more to come, and there’s a lot of polish to come.

JH: In your defence, I don’t think anybody’s done live support for a game in development of this size.

WL: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. But as they say, none of us is as dumb as all of us, right? That just popped into my head, I love that.

JH: I’m going to agree with you provisionally, and when we’re done, I’m going to think about that one…

WL: But it is true. This is such a massive project and to do the game on its own would be a challenge on itself, but to do it while we have live players testing and playing the game is certainly, fortunately we’ve got a lot of good playtesters out there who help us and give us fantastic data and feedback on what’s actually out there, and they’re pretty patient with us, we’ve got some pretty good people.

JH: Now what’d you do before this? Where’d you come from?

WL: So, before this I worked at NCsoft, worked on Guild Wars 2, worked on, we had Aion and Wildstar as well. Before that I had worked at Riot games, League of Legends. Before that at a previous stop at NCsoft, and I’d worked at EA for five years before that. 18 years in the industry, I feel like an old man here, right? We were talking about that earlier. Just a couple of old coots now. But I started back in 1997, almost on accident, and it’s been such a career, really blessed to do it.

JH: Your game support staff is expanding, tell us about that.

WL: We’re doubling in size. I’m very proud to say, we’re very excited to bring on our first team member in Manchester. We’re truly excited about the first to have a presence in that office is going to be very helpful for us, in terms of just communication and getting information to the Devs over in that studio, but also just timezone differences. So, we run these playtests, right now I have to run them at one time, because I’m only one man, it’s true, I can only do so much. What we’re hoping to do is expand our playtest over a different set of hours so that we can better service our European players as well as our US players, and ultimately what this’ll allow us to do is get better response times so that when you send a ticket, we get back to you pretty quick.

JH: So, before we let you go, what’s something that the players can do to help you guys do your job?

WL: What is..

JH: Besides use the issue council. Use the issue council.

WL: Issue council…

JH: How can they use the Issue Council more effectively?

WL: So, actually, we’ve actually had surprisingly good feedback, and participation, in the Issue Council so far. We didn’t really know what to expect, there aren’t a lot of people doing anything like this, and we’re so pleased with it, there’s so many people who go to report bugs, for both the launcher and the game there, and just, if anyone doesn’t know how it works, you enter a bug, it gets repeated by other players a certain amount of times. At that point, it gets kicked over to our QA department, right, who does analyse it and see if they try to reproduce it on their end, and on that point it goes into our pipeline, right, and so that is, that’s amazing, we’ve actually closed the feedback loop, it’s what we’ve always wanted in operations of online video games, and now we’re able to present that to players, so I think the biggest thing that they can do is help participate in the Issue Council, just because they’re actually making the game better, which is what we’re all here for, so…

JH: And, finally, before you go, tell us something fun or interesting about yourself, maybe not even necessarily work related.

WL: Okay, I like explosives, I like storm chasing, and I travel the world to go get into fights with other soccer fans, and it’s true. All these things are true.

JH: I could pursue that more, but I’m not going to. Okay, well, thanks a lot, thanks for coming on, back to you guys!

WL: Thank you, appreciate it.

20:13 – Ship Shape: The RSI Constellation

Jared Huckaby – JH: Thanks guys. On this episode of ship shape, were sitting down with principal vehicle artist Chris Smith, and Josh Coons to discuss the upcoming rework of the constellation. Chris, how are you doing?

Chris Smith – CS: Hey, how’s it going Jared?

JH: Good! Now, you’ve been working on the constellation for quite some time now.

CS: Yeah, we’ve been on it for a little while since february to be exact.

JH: Mmmkay. Coming up with Alpha 2.0 we’ll get to see the fruits of your labours

CS: Right, Finally!

JH: [Laughs] Finally. Now you’re going to take us through a tour of the inside of the constellation and later on we’ll get a Josh Coons in here and he’ll take us through the external. Now this is still work in progress, Alpha is not out yet, there still working on things, integrating the various builds and stuff but he was kind enough to offer to take us through so let’s see what they got. Chris, I leave it to you!

CS: Alright. So yes it’s still a work in progress but we are very far into it, we’re very close to being done with it. I’ll just swoop into the interior and walk you guys through it. Here we have the front bulkhead area and so the main difference that we did right away when we started rebuilding the constellation was to separate it out into modular sections so that we have a nose section and a neck section and a body section and a tail section.

That counts for the interiors and as well for the exterior and that helps us actually in the future for making variances and anything like that. We can, instead of building a whole new ship we can just swap out at piece and it becomes a new ship. Since most of our variances build that way it lends itself very well that.

Here is the nose bulkhead and the immediate change was to add a bulkhead to this area which didn’t exist in the previous version. There was actually no door here and so everything was left open and beyond this door there’s an airlock. If someone wanted to EVA out, the whole cockpit would be essentially exposed to the environment and potentially space so that wasn’t very acceptable so we added this bulkhead here which I think adds visually and makes it a nice segment and makes it a nice cockpit area; really I just want to say on the purpose of this ship and the area.

See here we have the seats, the pilot seat, as you can see too we got a lot of small detail and brought it up to the same visual standards of the retaliator when it was made so everything is super high detail and fidelity compared to the rest of the ships. Whoops, i’m like climbing up on the chair now.

JH: Kids gets down, Get down!

CS: [Chuckles]. This also represents a first lighting pass of the interior lighting of this ship; as you can see it’s sort got a little fog in there and atmosphere and everything. It’s still not done yet, there’s still some work to be done and we’ll have another pass on the interior lighting but it’s getting there. You know you can see the details like the lighting through the grading here which is cool and stuff like that.

Another big change to the front was the turret entrance and the previous version, the entrance was actually on the other side so you essentially had to walk over here and face this way to get into the turret but now all you have to do is just walk straight and then you can already use the turret. So that was a big I think, request too by the fans’ over the times that we’ve had the old connie out. There were tons of remodels and remakes done by fans, some to great success, we’ve actually adapted a lot of those changes into our own change. A lot of those requests were heard and answered in this one.

JH: I’m gonna throw you a tough question here. One of those most common requests is the inverted bottom turret.

CS: Yeah

JH: I noticed we don’t have the inverted bottom turret in there. Can you talk about why we haven’t done the inverted bottom turret.

CS: So you’re saying a request was actually to have it flipped?

JH: Basically you go down the stairs

CS: Like the retaliator?

JH: Exactly like the retaliator so they get the same field of view as the guy up top.

CS: Well initially were thinking about it but it was going to take a little more remodel that area and to make that facilitate that and it was actually going to take too long for the time that we had even though we had a long time to model this. When we spent 8 months on this ship and in the last 2 months working really hard just to get it to a point and were still not even done so these ships take a long long time, you need time to add new mechanics and stuff like that and adds even more time and R&D and all that stuff.

The Retaliator turret was done; when that was sort of progress and the whole debate about it. We were sort of already sort of past that part, we didn’t want to go back and then have to redo it so we kept it the way it is, in this case. Although I will say

JH: Field of view is much better than it was just looking at the CitizenCon demo.

CS: Yeah what we did was more or less we have this chair on a swivel, so it kinda swivels like a rocking chair backwards so you can look down as you move it around so that was sort of a bit of a compromise to help out the visual part. Another thing was we were concerned about the playability of the inverted turret. I’m not sure if the fans like the inverted turret.

JH: Everybody talks about lots of things, But until you get in there and play with it you never know whether it will work or not.

CS: It was a concern you know that it might even be confusing to have an inverted turret so I guess maybe the jury is still out on that

JH: I guess we’ll find out with the Retaliator actually.

CS: [Laughs] That was probably the biggest piece recently for keeping a list. Time constraints and also I don’t think every turret has to be a flip turret.

JH: No

CS: It was sort of like, well keep it with the original style of the Constellation

JH: Not all ships are supposed to be all things.

CS: Yeah you can’t have everything with everything… or can you? Well maybe you can… [chuckles]. We’ll see, hey! You know maybe in the future we’ll have a flip down turret version of the constellation. So here we are at the neck component of the ship. This will be the living quarters so my intent when I redid the interior of the constellation was to really have a distinctive feel when you walk through the ship, front to back.

You know you’re in a different room so not everything looks for the same so I made this room very contrast to the front of the room so it’s a lot brighter and wider and it’s more the living area right so it’s a little more friendly and added a lot more brighter colours. So right here we have the bench and there’s a retractable table and shelves, kitchen area, stuff like that. Fridge and here’s the airlock which was in the original model which was a big circular airlock. I made it a rectangular shape because actually with this ship we can now fit all the crew members on at once and get them down to the bottom so you don’t have do a one by one. The other one was a bit smaller and the shape of it didn’t lend it well to getting everyone on there.

JH: That’s the beautiful thing about game development, it’s iterative. You try things, some things work and some things don’t

CS: Yeah you found out right? Quickly

JH: [Laughs]

CS: And here we have the bathroom which is actually… In the.. I doubt it works at this point but I’m not going to risk it.

JH: Is the bathroom on the Constellation dangerous?

CS: Oh here we go, it does work. So here I made it actually a combo so it’s actually a shower with a toilet so you can do all of it at once if you really want to, if you feel so inclined. The idea is that you either go into brush your teeth or shower or you go in for you know, number one of number 2.

JH: After the starfarer incident I have to ask, where’s the toilet paper?

CS: Oh… Good question.. In space they don’t use toilet paper..

JH: Just floats away?

CS: Do they have toilet paper in the future? Maybe it’s an automatic bidet

JH: There was an old thing with an internal starfarer concept art that they had the toilet paper right under the shower head

CS: Oh wha.. [Laughs]

JH: Yeah got a comment about that so the toilet paper was obviously going to get wet. But you apparently don’t have toilet paper at all.

CS: I don’t have toilet paper at all

JH: So bring toilet paper with you when you go into the constellation bathroom

CS: You know what guys I’ll add that just for you.

JH: Or the three sea shells…. I can’t say it.

CS: I’ll add some Charmin in there… Alright so there’s the toilet and here we have lockers and then i’ve also added an armory station where machine guns and weapons can be added which wasn’t there in the previous connie which is very important for multi-crew ships. That was added, I added it to the living area because I thought it made most sense, it was close to the front cockpit area and it was centralized and it was in the living quarters you know, if they like get an emergency call, they have to jump out of bed and they’ll be right there.

JH: Makes sense, you don’t want to have to cover the entire length of the ship.

CS: Here we also have the escape pods and beds. Unfortunately I don’t think these doors work at the moment, but these doors would kind of split off and open up. So this was another big change. In the previous version, well actually the previous version we had the escape pods already shuttered off and airlocked out. But it looked very primitive, I guess, and textures and everything. So I just spruced it up and put some windows there and just made it look better over all. But the same concept applies, so that way when they EVA out nothing gets exposed to the environment.

CS: Here we get into the main cargo area, which we call the body module. And this is the main part of the ship and the biggest part of the ship. And this actually went somewhat relatively unchanged functionality wise. The cargo area is the same space as it was before, the way it opens and the way jettisons is the same way too.

CS: The main thing that I’ve added was a missile reload system. So when you walk over here you can actually see it. I took a little visual cue, functionality cue from the Retaliator what Nathan did with his cool view, you can see the missile bay area, which I thought was awesome. I thought it would be cool to add something similar to that here. So right above this, the missiles go straight up, that’s where the missile launcher for the exteriors are. And so they just, all after the top missiles get shot off, these guys just kind of slot up into the top part of the missile launcher and then they get shot out. If somebody were standing there they could see it actually happening with the missiles moving eventually.

CS: Then here we have the airlock, which is also the docking collar from the side, which stayed in the same space as the original Connie. Walk through here. Also another big thing we’ve added a lot of the components to this ship so eventually these boxes here will be replaced by actual components, avionics, that you’ll be able to service and repair and all that stuff. Right now I made these blocked off boxes but I indicated where they will go. Right now they are not serviceable but they’re there in the game you play.

CR: And here we get to the tail area intersection which is also where the Merlin is docked. Then we come down here. And so here is the Merlin, we made it very simple and so you see all you do is walk right up to it and then you may be able to jump in your Merlin. Right through the glass!

JH: In this build there are some animation issues?

CS: For sure. What I have here is not the final build or anything there’s animations that I have missing from this. So don’t get worried.

JH: We wanted to get this for you today, so we’re working with what we got.

CS: Yeah this is pretty much it. Josh (Coons) should be able to show you the exterior

JH: We’re going to take a minute and come back with Josh Coons. Thanks Chris.

CS: Later! Thank you

JH: Now we’re here with 3D artist Josh Coons who worked with Chris on the exterior of the Connstellation. Josh, how’re you doing man?

JC: Doing good.

JH: Now we’ve got a couple minutes left so take us through the exterior and show us what you got

JC: When we got the original mesh for this ship it was how we say in the biz “Not optimised”. So my main goal, first goal was to go through and make sure the polygons being used on the ship were actually being seen by the player. After deleting all that, I found out I could pretty much just do whatever I want on this ship and just add the crazy detail of the place. Which is good! We want that. I did some overall exterior silhouette tweaks trying to make it more angular, we have an evolving RSI style guide right now and we pushed that a little bit as we were making the ship.

JC: Here we have the new front end. We wanted to make it look more framey, more industrial and constructed. Show you where the parts are put together. We had a significant pass over the maneuvering thrusters and positioning. I completely redid those as well a little bit more detail on to that because they had none! Also for the nose section which is what we’re currently looking at the turret bay doors not a lot of detail in here. Went back and did some interior goods. Some decals which may be missing right now no they’re there it’s just dark in here! Some LED lighting, wanted some lighting states for battle mode and you know some real Star Trek influenced type stuff a little bit more exciting and added to the game play. So where the turrets pop out we have the new wing sections as well as the new flaps. These are up to my quality bar!

JH: No kidding!

JC: They were telling me in the beginning we had this RSI proprietary turbine technology which would be located on other ships yet to be made so i wanted to make sure those were super cool in re-use. Once I looked at them they were like a bajillion polys! They are not hooked up in the scene right now but once you guys get your hands on the file aim for this part. Blow those doors off you’ll be able to check them out.

JC: Moving on to the previously mentioned next section we have the new cover caps for; this is where you’ll be jettisoning out this side and this is a top escape bay. Passenger’s… no, it’s driver’s side, well… depends what country you’re in. More details I wanted to add in some kind of clues as to how this works I’ve got some dead-charge packs down here. Just make it feel more believable. You got your top hatch exit. Also on the bottom. Chris may have mentioned in the interior walk through, that we made this bigger so now instead of one dude going down everybody on the ship can go down. You can get 5 people on this as it goes down. Bottom escape pods but it’s a little dark right now.

JC: The main body section completely revamped these missile launcher fold outs. I think you guys will be more pleased with the shape they were kind of, they felt kind of flimsy so we thickened them up made them more beefy. More lights, the side air lock entrance, a lot more beefy. There’s still a lot more detail i’d like to do so far as the exterior goes. What you’re viewing now is the new missile deploy. So on the old Connie, they kind of just came out sadly and you couldn’t really see how they worked, so now they pop up at a sweet angle and when these get launched, I figure you’re going to see a cool pattern as to how they deploy. For the front main missiles. These got overhauled a lot I went back and forth with Chris Roberts on the design of these things, me and him had pretty much the same consensus on they were just too noisy so we dialled those back added some front DRL influenced type of landing scheme for the front. We now have the deployable countermeasures built into the sides.

JC: This thing was titanic. This is the biggest model I have ever worked on in my life! It’s absolutely huge. I wanted to integrate a lot more glass covered tech. Just to make it a little bit more complete. I added a little Constellation (here) so it’s a little Star Trek rip here. I wanted to add that in. Ship ain’t a ship without a name.

JC: Moving back to the tail a little plane back here. Now the lighting is not finished yet so ignore all the blinky lights because they are not set-up right. And here we have our new super proud of this got a lot of help from Elwin on hooking this bad boy up. But the new Merlin dock I think the crowd will find a lot more, i’ll just say cool! Backward turbine housings and nacelle attach point to the back. Looks like we may have a smoothing error right here. Just trying to get more details in there cause there just wasn’t enough details. New lights new landing gear the jet skis are gone so no more alpine skiing landing gears a lot more beefy, chunky, they form fit a whole lot better. Overall the shapes are a lot better and believe it or not this Constellation is I think half a million less polys than the original model and it looks like twice the polys.

JH: Yeah looks fantastic

JC: Thank you

JH: Folks are going to be stoked that’s why I wanted to do this. Wanted to get it out cause even with the CitizenCon demo we got to see some of the inside but we never really got a real great look at the exterior of the ship so I wanted to show that off. Alright Josh I think that’s great this is easily the longest Ship Shape we’ve ever done. So thanks to you and Chris for sitting down and taking us on a tour of this. Again this will come with alpha 2.0 and it will have its lighting and will look even better than what you’re seeing here today. So Josh thanks man

JC: Thank you

JH: Back to you guys.

BL: *singing* My Connie lies over the ocean

SG: Alright, no singing.

BL: One hundred thousand. How many Aurora pilots have crashed into asteroids? How many times Chris Roberts has answered questions about whether or not you can own space stations in 10 for the Chairman? How many Cheesits have backers have sent to the office?

SG: It’s how many followers the Star Citizen Facebook has! It’s over 100,000.

BL: Wooo! One hundred thousand!

SG: So, more would be great. We also have a Squadron 42 Facebook page, that has I think three followers, so if you are a Facebook follower, get out there and follow Squadron 42. Also we have Squadron 42 on our Instagram, which we’re going to be populating a bit more, and also on Twitter.

BL: Yup, we have kicked off social media for Squadron 42. There’s a Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you are a social media fan, check those out, and of course we have those active for all of Star Citizen also. So, we push everything from collectible trading cards to screenshots to the latest news. It’s a great place to hear about Star Citizen!

SG: And now, it’s time for MvP!

44:54 – MVP

SG: Do we have the Envelope?

BL: Sure, why not! Here’s the envelope…

SG: The envelope please… Are you serious?

BL: We forgot to make an envelope

SG: Okay, great. And the winner is Shane!

BL: Shane was the person who put together the fantastic Star Citizen Bar Citizen party last night

SG: Not last night, Sunday night.

BL: Sunday night, yes, because we didn’t shoot this on Monday at all. So he organized an event kind fo spur of the moment for about 100 people, had to change venues in mid stream at the last minute, he handled all that, organized it all, and it was such a big help to us, it was a cool event too. We got to meet all sorts of backers, talk Star Citizen, which is pretty much what we like to do, and

SG: It was a great event, and in two weeks time we’re looking at having another little get together, this time with Chris and Erin

BL: We’ll post more details about that shortly. And here it is! Your art sneak peek!

46:00 – Art Sneak Peek

SG: And what was that?

BL: We’ll find out…

SG: Tomorrow!

BL: We’ll be answering your questions about that art sneak peek, about Star Citizen in general, at the very last Reverse the ‘Verse from the old office! Tomorrow at 11am Pacific on Twitch, join us to talk Star Citizen!

SG: And check back later in the week for a weekly development update on Star Citizen Alpha 2.0!

BL: We’re getting close. we’re all very excited, ah… you’re going to like this one.

SG: Finally, there’s no Around the ‘Verse next week, and Ben was supposed to say that.

BL: We’ve kind of mixed up who’s saying what at this point, but we’re just going with it.

BL: And we will have Chris and the rest of the gang answering your questions and presenting some pretty cool stuff they’ve been working on since CitizenCon. I know I say this about everything, but you won’t want to miss this one.

SG: Mhmm. 11am to 2pm PST. And, as always, thank you very much to subscribers for making this show possible, and all of our other video content possible, and allowing us to come here to Austin Texas. We will see you next week on the livestream!

BL: The livestream, yes! And the week after, Around the ‘Verse on our new sets!